


(be)longing

by RowboatCop



Category: Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: Gen, Multi, Rey as a kid, Rey centric, Rey ficlet, Rey getting a family, Rey learning the force, just me crying about Rey
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-10
Updated: 2016-01-10
Packaged: 2018-05-13 01:10:59
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 881
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5688796
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RowboatCop/pseuds/RowboatCop
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>She’s seven years old, and her favorite thing is to lie in the sand and look up at the stars. Usually, she imagines her family — hazy, half-remembered shapes and voices — coming down from the stars to take her away.</p>
<p>Sometimes, though, she imagines that she can feel the whole universe around her, and her skin tingles with something bigger and better and more than what she’s ever known.</p>
            </blockquote>





	(be)longing

She’s seven years old, and her favorite thing is to lie in the sand and look up at the stars. Usually, she imagines her family — hazy, half-remembered shapes and voices — coming down from the stars to take her away.

Sometimes, though, she imagines that she can _feel_ the whole universe around her, and her skin tingles with something bigger and better and _more_ than what she’s ever known.

More than she remembers her own family, she remembers the stories they used to tell — Luke Skywalker and the Jedi, the power of the Force, the energy that binds the universe together. And sometimes, sometimes...she swears she can feel it. She imagines that she’s a Jedi, that the tingle under her skin is the Force running through her.

She imagines being powerful and filled with light, but more than that she imagines _belonging_ in the universe, being bound to a family by the Force.

And then Unkar Plutt throws a piece of scrap at her, reminds her that she has to wake up with the sun if she wants to earn her portion, and she comes inside to her tiny bed and ignores the tingling under her skin.

  
  


* * *

  
  


She’s twelve years old, and her favorite thing is to sit inside the AT-AT where she’s made a home, her very own, where no one can tell her what to do.

Plutt controls her food, it’s true, same as he controls everything in this outpost, but the feeling of freedom is almost enough to make it okay.

She’s collected enough things to make her place her own — portions traded for seeds that she tries to grow in shallow pans of water under the shady spots around the AT-AT, for some scraps of rebel uniform, for a helmet that makes her feel sometimes like she’s connected to something bigger than she is. Her skin tingles when she puts it on, and she’s filled with the sense that things can be better than they are.

There are no more fantasies, though, that she might be more than she is — that she might be a Jedi or a fighter or anything other than a scavenger who is waiting.

But having her own place, her own things — it helps her wait.

  
  


* * *

  
  


She’s fifteen years old, and her favorite thing is to take the scrapped ships and coax them to fly — never enough to leave orbit, just enough to race along the dunes, to flip and turn and feel like she could leave.

She _could_.

It’s enough to know that this is her choice, to stay.

The feeling of her heart in her throat as she makes daring runs across the desert quiets the tingle under her skin, quiets the sense that maybe there’s more than this.

And when she’s back on the ground, she can go back to the home she’s made, and keeping waiting.

  
  


* * *

  
  


She’s seventeen years old, and her favorite thing is to walk outside in the pitch black of night, wrapped in her blanket, to look up at the stars.

There’s a knowledge settling in her bones that no one will ever come back for her, and a recurring dream of an island surrounded by more water than can possibly exist. It’s like a call, a call away from here.

It’s a call she can never ever take.

The only time she can close out such thoughts is when the cold night air of the desert and the sprawling blanket of stars calm the tingling under her skin, let her shut out the sense that the universe is trying to close in on her, trying to turn her into something she’s not.

The universe is vast, but it’s all out there. It’s all out there, and she is here, and that’s enough.

  
  


* * *

  
  


She’s nineteen years old, and her favorite thing is to race across the island after training with Master Luke, to the giant rock that overlooks the calmest part of the bay.

When she stands just right, all the can see on any side of her is the water, and it lets her be _open_ , open in a way she’s been fighting for most of her life. Her skin tingles with the knowledge she’s spent her whole life closing out, that she _is_ one with the universe, that she’s a Jedi.

It calms the seven year old girl inside her, the one that would pretend sometimes to use the Force and be a Jedi, and the twelve year old who closed out those fantasies for good, and the fifteen year old who chose to stay somewhere she never really belonged, and the seventeen year old who tried _so hard_ to shut out the universe.

(It was never closing in on her, she knows, just flowing through her, like she lets it now.)

  
  


* * *

  
  


She’s twenty years old, and her favorite thing is to lie on the fertile ground around the base and look up at the stars. Finn’s chest is warm and soft behind her, and from behind him, Poe reaches forward to set his flight helmet on her head.

When her skin tingles, she opens herself to it, lets the Force flow through her, secure in the knowledge that she belongs in the universe, and that she has found a family where she belongs.

  
  
  


 


End file.
